I think this is a case of you seeing what you want to see, and me seeing what's there.
According to you, people lost their own money. But the state of the national accounts shows that people lost
other people's money
When people lose their own money, it is investors making errors. When people lose
other people's money, it is government doing evil.
According to you, a white bum with no assets, no income, and no credit rating could buy a million dollar house no money down as easily as an hispanic bum with no assets, no income, and no credit rating could buy a million dollar house no money down, and frequently did so. But if you search for foreclosures on the real estate websites, the foreclosures are where Hispanics and blacks are, and not where poor whites are, indicating the economic crisis is, within America, primarily a crisis of affirmative action, though other forms of socialism also contributed, as with GM and MF Global.
You are unable to see what is glaringly obvious if you look up foreclosures on the real estate sites, unable to see what is glaringly obvious if you read the bureaucrats sending letters threatening banks and pressuring them to make dodgy race based loans
http://www2.fdic.gov/crapes/2007/32069_071001.pdfI don't have an ideological lens through which to filter reality, no axe to grind,
And yet you chant the the standard folk Marxist formulae, as if they were holy prayers and divinely revealed truth. You sound like someone with an ideological axe to grind - you sound like someone who lives and breathes the official line day in and day out, so that tired old slogans become a reflexive substitute for speech and thought. You sound like someone who has spent a lot of time filling out the political requirements for admission to an elite university, and has started to think like the sort of person one must pretend to be in order gain admission, who has pretended so deeply to the politics that university admission officers look for, that the pretense is sinking in and becoming real.
"White, black, brown, fuchsia, paisley, it didn't matter." Can anyone say that with a straight face? Perhaps if your face twitches when you say it, you will fail your interview. Race and gender matters all the time everywhere, matters more than anything else, and if you forget it for a moment when you are at work or dealing with academic authorities, that moments lapse can destroy your career.
Such a bizarrely unreal statement - you might as well be chanting "power to the people" - and three decades ago, your equivalent
was chanting "power to the people".
It is obvious you have received a lot of training in PC, which requires you to be intensely mindful of race and gender and sexual preference all the time everywhere. And then you tell me race is irrelevant!
You could seriously and rationally argue that racial preferences were not a large factor in the loans crisis, and then we could start looking at various statistics to assess the impact of racial preferences, but to piously assert that "White, black, brown, fuchsia, paisley, it didn't matter", as if this assertion was entirely unsurprising and perfectly believable, indicates detachment from reality and the mindlessly rigid regurgitation of official propaganda, indicates a training in PC that runs so deep as to resemble the effects of brain damage or a stroke.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That race "did not matter", is an extraordinary claim, particularly when we have no end of threatening letters from the regulators to the banks telling the banks that it did matter a great deal, particularly when we have no end of loud political posturing from 1994 to 2006 or so that the banks were being wickedly racist in failing to give blacks and Hispanics as many loans as those poor victims deserved.
You would be better off with the official story, that there was just a teensy weensy little little bit of affirmative action, far too tiny to matter, but to blandly say "race did not matter" is just ludicrous, the PC reflex overriding basic sanity.
You don't sound like someone with no axe to grind. You sound like the sort of person that everyone pretends to be when they solicit admission to an elite university, as if you had put so much thought and energy into that pretense, that it is hard to shed it for a different pretense.
my contention that pretty much everyone was sucking at the teat
We can tell who was allowed to suck at the teat by looking at the distribution of foreclosures on the real estate sites.
We can also read documents issued by the regulators commanding banks to supply the teat to particular groups.
Since this was a matter of gambling with other people's money it was a matter of politics. Next question.
What then was the politics?
Why, it was the politics that was shouted from the rooftops loud and clear all the way from 1994 up to 2007 - that banks were "racist" in withholding loans, which "racism" was the subject of no end of political and regulatory measures.
Well, I hear you ask, if it was lending to Hispanics and blacks that sent the US bust, what is sending the Eurozone bust?
To answer that question, ask where MF Global's money went.
From your perspective, all this came about through nefarious gov't scheming, socialist social engineering, and ne'er do well minorities working the system, victimizing the poor, unsuspecting banking, securities, and real estate industries.
They suspected that if they allowed themselves to be victimized, they would be bailed out.
But yes, some of them, notably the bank of Beverly Hills and Lehman brothers, really were victimized. What, tell me, did the Bank of Beverly Hills do wrong?
All innocent, guileless babes in the woods, taken advantage of by those awful scheming brown people and their evil socialist accomplices.
When I see a bum with no job and no assets, who cannot speak English, buy a million dollar house no money down, yes he is an awful scheming brown person.
Somewhat similarly, you see black gangs randomly beat up random white people out of racial hate. You don't see white gangs randomly beat up random black people out of racial hate. This is a pretty obvious fact of reality, and denial just reveals you blinded by dogma to an extent that sounds like brain damage.
Certain bad deeds and incompetent deeds really are characteristic of certain racial groups. You don't lend money to Mexicans, regardless of whether you are white or Mexican, and you don't withdraw money from an ATM with a couple of black men standing behind you, regardless whether you are white or black.
And anyone who piously says he does not worry about the race of the guy standing behind him at the ATM lies. Mexicans won't lend money to other Mexicans, just as black taxi drivers fail to pick up black passengers. Why should I have to lend to Mexicans?
And women don't like women bosses any more than men like women bosses.
If a Mexican is borrowing a million dollars, yes, chances are that he really is a nefarious brown man.
As with section eight housing, the whole point and purpose of the program was that by putting Mexicans in a middle class sort of environment, they would develop middle class virtues, which implicitly admits what is explicitly denied: That Mexicans frequently lack middle class virtues.
From my perspective, this was just another housing bubble which because of the elimination of laws specifically designed to prevent what happened from happening
And what laws, tell me, were these?
What laws were there to prevent banks from making million dollar loans to bums?
I can quote you the regulators telling Beverly Hills bank to lower its standards in order to make more loans to Hispanics. Where was the law that told banks to maintain their standards that the wicked free marketers repealed?
I think the difference between you and I is that you ascribe to malice, social engineering, and chicanery what I ascribe to stupidity, shortsightedness, and chicanery.
The difference is that you are chanting by rote the political correct formulae of official truth, regardless of whether they make sense in context, or are indeed relevant to the present context, whereas I keep invoking the actual facts of what happened.
Again, where was this law that told banks to maintain their standards? What laws were repealed that somehow caused the financial crisis? How were these laws preventing the crisis, and how did repealing them contribute to the crisis?
You don't know, and you don't care. You are not observing reality, but mechanically chanting formulaic ideology.
You say you observe reality, but somehow you neglected to observe these laws.
Today in America is like 1980 in the Soviet Union. Everyone says they believe, but no one actually believes, and those who preach the ideology believe less than anyone.
